From Esoteric Prophecy to Popular Culture

The idea of an approaching Age of Aquarius entered wide circulation through twentieth century esoteric writing well before it became a piece of popular culture. Alice A. Bailey, whose Esoteric Astrology was published in 1951, wrote extensively of the Piscean age giving way to an Aquarian one, framing the transition in terms of an incoming spiritual and humanitarian influence she associated with the sign Aquarius, work that built on earlier Theosophical interest in cyclical ages. The idea reached a far wider public audience in 1967 through the musical Hair and its opening number "Aquarius," which took the phrase from this same esoteric background and, without endorsing any particular technical dating, made "the Age of Aquarius" a byword for the era's countercultural aspirations toward peace, communal living and expanded consciousness.

Nicholas Campion's History of Western Astrology treats the Aquarian age idea as a case study in how an astrological concept can detach almost entirely from its technical astronomical basis once it enters broader culture, since the great majority of people who now use the phrase are invoking Bailey's and Hair's associations of the coming age with idealism and transformation rather than any specific claim about precession.